Free Speech in the News: The Top Ten Stories of 2018

From a wedding-cake court verdict to a governmental assault on sex workers, Front Page Confidential offers an iconoclastic rundown of 2018's most compelling free-speech storylines

The battle over free speech raged in courtrooms, on college campuses, and on social media in 2018, with wedding cakes for same-sex couples and the federal government’s attack on sex workers taking center stage. In no particular order, are the top free-speech headlines of 2018, torn from the web pages of Front Page Confidential.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker who refused to create a custom cake to celebrate a couple’s same-sex union. But the main issue — civil rights vs. First Amendment rights — remains unresolved, guaranteeing that the court will get another bite at this constitutional confection sometime in the future. (Phillips is already back in court after the Colorado Civil Rights Commission nicked him again — this time for refusing to bake a custom cake to celebrate a transgender customer’s transition.)

Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple because their nuptials conflicted with his religious views (screenshot via YouTube)

In March of 2018, Congress passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which essentially outlaws all erotic ads online in the name of stamping out sex trafficking. Fearing prosecution, many websites went dark or curtailed services before President Trump even signed the bill into law.

The past year has seen a web-wide scrub of supposedly offensive speech from nearly all major internet companies, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Tumblr, a platform whose main claim to fame had been its status as the Baskin-Robbins of user-posted porn. Tumblr’s announcement of a sitewide ban on porn led to howls of outrage and derision from its own base, along with predictions of the site’s eventual self-inflicted collapse.

What would the U.S. be like without a First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech? It would be like Great Britain, where you can get hauled into court and convicted of a hate crime for posting a video of your pet pug, Buddha, sieg heil-ing archival footage of Hitler. God Bless America!

Here’s another country that doesn’t have a First Amendment (much less any number of civil and human rights): Saudi Arabia. That didn’t deter the McCain Institute from pocketing a $1 million donation from the Saudis in 2014, an act of self-interest and hypocrisy that the McCain-besotted mainstream media continues to ignore, even after the Saudis almost certainly assassinated Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October of 2018.

How better to teach high school students the importance of free speech than by denying free speech to an artist? That’s what happened in Los Angeles when a painter’s donated mural depicting screen legend Ava Gardner offended Korean-born residents who claimed the work’s background resembled the war flag of Imperial Japan. Incredibly, the school district succumbed to the pressure and ordered the painting whitewashed. Class dismissed.

Beau Stanton’s mural, The Lady of the Grove, on a wall outside the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles (courtesy of Beau Stanton)

The ACLU has been scoring First Amendment wins left and right against state laws that deny contracts to businesses that are unwilling to pledge not to participate in the anti-Israeli BDS Movement (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions). So far the ACLU has had success in Kansas and Arizona, with federal judges forbidding the enforcement of these laws on the grounds that they are likely unconstitutional.

A photo taken on the Palestinian side of Bethlehem’s security fence (Neil Ward via Flickr)

On Friday, April 6, 2018, in an act of direct censorship, the federal government seized and shut down the online listings site Backpage.com, arresting former owners and veteran newspapermen Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, along with five others, on scores of bogus counts involving the promotion of prostitution and money laundering. Lacey, who along with Larkin founded FPC in September 2017 to report on free-speech issues, wrote this first-person account of the FBI raid on his home, titling it with a nod to the great Warren Zevon.

Michael Lacey at a January 2017 hearing of the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, where he invoked his rights under the First and Fifth amendments not to testify (screenshot of video from Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations)

Wwhen it comes to reminding the American public of the importance of the First Amendment, Donald J. Trump is the gift that keeps on giving. One day he’s tweeting that the press is the “enemy of the people,” and the next he’s suggesting that an SNL parody of It’s a Wonderful Life — with Alec Baldwin as Trump in the role of George Bailey — “can’t be legal” and should be “tested in courts.” In truth, the First Amendment protects parodies of public officials, and even if Trump doesn’t get it, the American people do. That fact is almost worth the aggravation of enduring four years with this doofus at the helm.

Time and time again, the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed that the First Amendment protects even so-called hate speech from government sanction. But the First Amendment does not shield speakers from public condemnation, ridicule, or other negative consequences. And with the ubiquity of cell phones and social media, chances are greater than ever that bigots will be identified and pilloried online.

About Stephen Lemons

Stephen Lemons is an award-winning investigative journalist with more than 20 years of experience covering everything from government corruption to white-supremacist gangs. In addition to Front Page Confidential, his work has appeared in Phoenix New Times, the Los Angeles Times, Salon.com, and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report magazine.

About Front Page Confidential

Front Page Confidential is published by Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin and edited by Stephen Lemons. We aim to bring our readers important news, commentary, and historical perspectives on all matters related to free speech — from how it affects us all to how it will affect our future rights to speak freely.

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